After a while he put one ear to the door. No sound came from the room beyond – at least none that he could hear over the runaway thudding of his heart.
His legs felt rubbery, and the perceived weight of the Heckler & Koch – more important than its real weight
– was now twenty pounds, maybe twenty-five, so heavy that his arm was beginning to ache with the burden of it.
What was the creature doing in there? Was it still ripping out of the cotton fabric, like a waking mummy unwinding its burial wrappings?
He tried again to assure himself that this whole incident was an hallucination brought on by a stroke.
His mother had been right. The cheeseburgers, the French fries, the onion rings, the double-thick chocolate milkshakes – those were the culprits that had done him in. Although he was only thirty, his abused circulatory system had collapsed under the massive freight of cholesterol that he forced it to carry. When this terminal episode was finished and the pathologists performed an autopsy on him, they would discover that his arteries and veins were clogged with enough greasy fat to lubricate the wheels on all the trains in America. Standing over his coffin, his weeping but quietly smug mother would say, Tuong, I try tell you but you not listen, never listen. Too many cheeseburgers, soon you look like big fat cheeseburger, start seeing little snake-eyed monsters, fall dead of shock in upstairs hall with gun in your hand like dumb whiskey-drinking detective in books. Stupid boy, eating like crazy Americans, and now look what happen.
Inside the office, something rattled softly.
Tommy pressed his ear lighter to the paper-thin crack between the door and the jamb. He heard nothing more, but he was certain that he hadn’t imagined the first sound. The silence in that room now had a menacing quality.
On one level, he was frustrated and angry with himself for continuing to behave as though the snake-eyed mini-kin was actually inside the office, standing on his desk, shedding its white cotton chrysalis.
But, at the same time, instinctively he knew that he was not truly insane, no matter how much he might wish that he were. And he knew that, in fact, he also was not suffering from a stroke or a cerebral haemorrhage, no matter how much more comforting such a condition might be compared with admitting the reality of the rag doll from Hell.
Or wherever it was from. Certainly not from Toys R Us. Not from one of the shops at Disneyland.
No delusion. No figment of imagination. It’s in there.
Well, all right, if it was in the office, then it couldn’t open the door to get out, so the smartest thing to do was leave it alone, go downstairs or even get out of the house altogether, and call the police. Find help.
Right away he saw one serious problem with that scenario: The Irvine Police Department didn’t have a doll -from Hell SWAT team that it customarily dispatched upon request. They didn’t have an anti-werewolf strike force, either, or a vampire-vice squad. This was southern California, after all, not darkest Transylvania or New York City.
The authorities would probably write him off as a crackpot akin to those people who reported being raped by Bigfoot or who wore homemade aluminium-foil hats to defeat the sinister extraterrestrials who were supposedly attempting to enslave them with microwave beams broadcast from the mother ship. The cops wouldn’t bother to send anyone in answer to his call.
Or worse, no matter how calmly he described the encounter with the doll, the police might decide that he was suffering a psychotic episode and was a danger to himself and to others. Then he could be committed to a hospital psychiatric ward for observation.
Usually a young writer, struggling to build a reader-ship, needed all the publicity he could get. But Tommy wasn’t able to imagine how his publisher’s promotion of his future novels could be enhanced by a press kit filled with stories about his vacation in a psycho ward and photographs of him in a chic straitjacket. That wasn’t exactly a John Grisham image.